Mandarin Chinese
Contents |
Mandarin Chinese
Traditional Chinese 官話
Simplified Chinese 官话
Hanyu Pinyin Guān Huà
Transliterations
Mandarin
- Hanyu Pinyin Guān Huà
Commonly known as
Traditional Chinese 北方話
Simplified Chinese 北方话
Transliterations
Mandarin
- Hanyu Pinyin Běifāng Huà
Mandarin
官話/官话
Spoken in People's Republic of China
Region Most of northern and southwestern China, Taiwan and Singapore (and other overseas Chinese communities)
Total speakers 885 million (first language speakers) [1]
Total Speakers: 1,365,053,177
Ranking 1 (native speakers)
Language family Sino-Tibetan
Language codes
ISO 639-1 zh
ISO 639-2 chi (B) zho (T)
ISO 639-3 cmn
Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode.
Mandarin (simplified Chinese: 官话; traditional Chinese: 官話; pinyin: Guānhuà; literally "speech of officials" or simplified Chinese: 北方话; traditional Chinese: 北方 話; pinyin: Běifānghuà; literally "northern dialect(s)"), is a category of related Chinese dialects spoken across most of northern and south-western China. When taken as a separate language, as is often done in academic literature, the Mandarin language has more native speakers than any other language. The "standard" in Standard Mandarin refers to the official standardized language of China based on the Beijing dialect.
In English, Mandarin can refer to either of two distinct concepts:
- In everyday use "Mandarin" refers to Standard Chinese or Standard Mandarin (Putonghua / Guoyu / Huayu), which is based on the particular Mandarin dialect spoken in Beijing. Standard Mandarin functions as the official spoken language of the People's Republic of China (PRC), the official language of the Republic of China (ROC/Taiwan), and one of the four official languages of Singapore. "Chinese"—in practice Standard Mandarin—is one of the six official languages of the United Nations.
- In its broader sense, Mandarin is a diverse group of Mandarin dialects spoken in northern and southwestern China (Guanhua / Beifanghua / Beifang fangyan).
The use of Mandarin as indicating a grouping of northern Chinese dialects is defined and used mainly by linguists, and is not commonly used outside of academic circles. Instead, Chinese native speakers of forms of Mandarin other than Standard Mandarin typically do not describe the language they speak as "Mandarin", but rather are most likely to simply state the name of the geographic variant that they speak, for example Sichuan dialect, Hebei dialect or Northeastern dialect, considered distinct from "Standard Mandarin" (Putonghua). Native speakers who are not academic linguists may not recognize that the variants they speak are classified in linguistics as members of Mandarin ("Northern Dialects") in a broader sense. Within Chinese social or cultural discourse, there is not a common "Mandarin" identity based on language; rather, there are strong regional identities centred on individual dialects, because of the wide geographical distribution and cultural diversity of speakers.
As with all other varieties of the Chinese language, there is significant dispute as to whether Mandarin is a language or a dialect. See Varieties of Chinese for more on this issue.
History
The present divisions of the Chinese language developed out of the different ways in which dialects of Old Chinese and Middle Chinese evolved.
Most Chinese living in northern and south-western China are native speakers of a dialect of Mandarin. The prevalence of this linguistic homogeneity in northern China is largely the result of geography: much of northern China is covered by plains and is flat. In contrast to this, the mountains and rivers of southern China have promoted linguistic diversity.
Chronologically, there is no clear line to mark where Middle Chinese ends and Mandarin begins; however, the Zhōngyuán Yīnyùn (中原音韵), a rhyme book from the Yuan Dynasty, is widely regarded as a milestone in the history of Mandarin. In this rhyme book we see many characteristic features of Mandarin, such as the reduction and disappearance of final stop consonants and the reorganization of the Middle Chinese tones.
Until the mid-20th century, most Chinese people living in southern China spoke only their local language. Beijing Mandarin became dominant during the Manchu-ruling Qing Dynasty, and from the 17th century onward, the empire established orthoepy academies (simplified Chinese: 正音书院; traditional Chinese: 正音書院; pinyin: Zhèngyīn Shūyuàn) in an attempt to make local pronunciations conform to the Beijing standard so that the Emperor could communicate with all officials directly.
This situation changed with the widespread introduction of Standard Mandarin as the national language, to be used in education, the media, and formal situations in both the PRC and the ROC (but not in Hong Kong). As a result, Standard Mandarin can now be spoken intelligibly as a second language by most younger people in Mainland China and Taiwan, with various regional accents. In Hong Kong and Macau, because of their colonial and linguistic history, the language of education, the media, formal speech and everyday life remains the local Cantonese, although Standard Mandarin is very influential now.
Name and classification
The English term comes from the Portuguese mandarim or Dutch mandorijn, from Malay [məntəˈri], from Hindi mantri, from Sanskrit mantrin (meaning councilor or minister); it is a translation of the Chinese term Guānhuà (simplified Chinese: 官话; traditional Chinese: 官話), which literally means the language of the mandarins (imperial magistrates). The term Guānhuà is often considered archaic by Chinese speakers of today, though it is often used by linguists as a collective term to refer to all varieties and dialects of Mandarin, not just standard Mandarin. Another term commonly used to refer to all varieties of Mandarin is Běifānghuà (simplified Chinese: 北方话; traditional Chinese: 北方話), or the dialect(s) of the North, although this term is used less and less among Chinese linguists in favour of "Guānhuà".
Standard Mandarin
From an official point of view, there are two versions of Standard Mandarin, since the PRC government refers to that on the Mainland as Putonghua, whereas the ROC government refers to their official language as Kuo-yü (Guoyu in pinyin).
Technically, both Putonghua and Guoyu base their phonology on the Beijing accent, though Putonghua also takes some elements from other sources. Comparison of dictionaries produced in the two areas will show that there are few substantial differences. However, both versions of "school" Standard Mandarin are often quite different from the Mandarin dialects that are spoken in accordance with regional habits, and neither is wholly identical to the Beijing dialect. Putonghua and Guoyu also differ from the Beijing dialect in vocabulary, grammar, and usage.
It is important to note that the terms "Putonghua (Common Language)" and "Guoyu (National Language)" refer to speech, and hence the difference in the use of simplified characters and traditional characters is not usually considered to be a difference between these two concepts.
Dialects
There are regional variations in Mandarin. This is manifested in two ways:
- The varieties of Mandarin cover a huge area containing nearly a billion people. As a result, there are pronounced regional variations in pronunciation, vocabulary and grammar. These regional differences are rather more pronounced than the differences in the varieties of English found in England, Scotland, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the United States.[citation needed]
- Standard Mandarin has been promoted very actively by the PRC, the ROC, and Singapore as a second language. As a result[citation needed], those who are not native speakers of Standard Mandarin frequently flavour it with a strong infusion of the sounds of their native languages.
Dialects of Mandarin can be subdivided into eight categories: Beijing Mandarin, Northeastern Mandarin, Ji Lu Mandarin, Jiao Liao Mandarin, Zhongyuan Mandarin, Lan Yin Mandarin, Southwestern Mandarin, and Jianghuai Mandarin. Jin is sometimes considered the ninth category of Mandarin. (Others separate it from Mandarin altogether.)
Phonology
- See Mandarin phonology for a description of Standard Mandarin phonology and dialects of Mandarin for an overview of the phonologies of Mandarin dialects.
Unlike Cantonese and Min Nan which are syllable-timed languages, Mandarin is a stress-timed language (Avery & Ehrlich 1992) like many western languages including English.
Syllables consist maximally of an initial consonant, a glide, a vowel, a final, and tone. Not every syllable that is possible according to this rule actually exists in Mandarin, as there are rules prohibiting certain phonemes from appearing with others, and in practice there are only a few hundred distinct syllables.
Phonological features that are generally shared by the Mandarin dialects include:
- the palatalization of velars and alveolar sibilants when they occur before palatal glides;
- the disappearance of final stops and /-m/ (although in many Jianghuai Mandarin and Jin dialects, the glottal stop has been preserved as a final);
- the disappearance of the entering tone (although it has been preserved in many Jianghuai Mandarin and Jin dialects) and the presence of four tonal categories;
- the presence of retroflex consonants (although these are absent in many dialects of Southwestern and Northeastern Mandarin);
- the historical devoicing of plosives and sibilants.
Vocabulary
There are more polysyllabic words in Mandarin than in all other major varieties of Chinese except Shanghainese. This is partly because Mandarin has undergone many more sound changes than have southern varieties of Chinese, and has needed to deal with many more homophones—usually by forming new words via compounding, or by adding affixes such as lao- (老), -zi (子), -(e)r (兒/儿), and -tou (頭/头). There are also a small number of words that have been polysyllabic since Old Chinese, such as húdié (蝴蝶, butterfly).